But if a straightforward happy ending is what you are after, Departures is not the film for you. This miraculously self-financed and stylish debut feature is not purely affirmative. At times, the screen shimmers with sadness. And yet, wryly and playfully, the film also resists becoming gloomy. Tonally sophisticated, it combines the bleak with the whimsical, ultimately sidestepping the crude dichotomy of happy or unhappy endings altogether.<\/p>\n
The film opens with a love-scarred Benji (played by the film\u2019s writer and co-director Lloyd Eyre-Morgan) recalling a recent relationship. In flashback, he remembers meeting handsome Jake (David Tag) in the airport as they both wait for a flight to Amsterdam. Jake bewilders Benji: his flirtation is suggestive but always deniable, never quite declaring itself. Charismatic and assertive, Jake engineers it so that they sit together on the flight, telling the air steward that he is Benji\u2019s carer \u2013 a description which quickly becomes grimly ironic. <\/p>\n Later, Jake rejects the suggestion that he is gay but demands that Benji give him a blowjob regardless. Monthly trips to Amsterdam follow and the two men develop a form of intimacy, but one which affords the softer, more pliable Benji little power.<\/p>\n In such a brief synopsis, the scenario risks sounding cliched. Familiar narrative devices pile up: the physically asymmetrical gay relationship in which the self-consciousness of one man makes them susceptible to the coercive manipulations of the more assured partner in a whirlwind of sex and drugs and emotional control. A comparable dynamic played out in another recent queer film, Pillion<\/a>.<\/p>\n Benji, longing for this to be more than a once-monthly dose of overseas sex, withstands put-downs and disappointments. His quiet, emotional expressions of desire (played movingly by Eyre-Morgan) contrast with Jake\u2019s struggle to accept his attraction to men. Tag is excellent and his portrayal of Jake is sometimes harsh and defensive, but also shows vulnerability, which prevents him from becoming a one-dimensional monster. Because of these tensions, the relationship\u2019s unhappy ending feels like a dead cert.<\/p>\n Departures takes familiar cliches and gives them new life, turning them into something unexpectedly revealing. Its understated story recalls many films about gay suffering \u2013 from A Single Man to All of Us Strangers<\/a> \u2013 but it refuses to stay within that familiar emotional frame.<\/p>\n Instead, the film disrupts expectations through bold, stylised touches that feel borrowed, perhaps improbably, from the Heartstopper<\/a> playbook. The result is a work that plays with recognisable influences while twisting them into something more strange, lively and original.<\/p>\n Heartstopper, the popular Netflix queer teen drama, deliberately avoids the more difficult or painful stories often told about queer life. Instead, it offers the kind of wish-fulfilling, happy endings that Rich suggested many queer viewers have long desired. Every glance, touch and kiss between its characters is punctuated with playful on-screen doodles \u2014 bursts of electricity, fluttering butterflies and swirling text that insist we are watching Love with a capital L.<\/p>\n Departures borrows these same twee, saccharine stylistic gestures, but uses them in a very different context. Applied to a darker, sometimes even sordid story about control and sadness, they take on a mischievous, unsettling edge.<\/p>\nLessons from Heartstopper<\/h2>\n
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